1. Technical Field
An aspect of the present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, specifically to an image forming apparatus, which is capable of discharging liquid to form an image on a recording medium according to print data.
2. Related Art
An image forming apparatus to form an image on a recording medium (e.g., a sheet of paper) in colored liquid (e.g., ink) by driving a liquid discharge head (e.g., an inkjet head) according to print data is known. The print data may be created in the image forming apparatus based on image data, and the image data representing the image to be formed may be inputted in the image forming apparatus from an external device. Therefore, the image forming apparatus may have a data-creating function module to create the print data and a data transmitter means in the data-function function module. Further, the image forming apparatus may have a function module to control the liquid squiring head and a data receiver means in the head-controlling function module. The print data created in the data-creating function module is divided into a plurality of line data, each of which represents a line composing the image, and transmitted from the transmitter to the receiver in the head-controlling function module on basis of the line data. Thus, the liquid discharge head is driven to discharge the liquid onto specific pixel areas in the sheet at specific timings according to the transmitted print data. In so doing, the image as represented by the image data is formed on the sheet. In this regard, a printable area in the sheet are partitioned along a direction of conveying the sheet and along a direction orthogonal to the sheet conveying direction and defined as pixel areas.
When the print data received in the head-controlling function module contains errors and/or data loss, the liquid may not be discharged properly in corresponding pixel areas as intended in the image data, and the formed image based on the deficient print data may appear incomplete. In other words, image-forming quality of the image forming apparatus may be degraded. Meanwhile, a method to detect errors and data loss caused in data transmission is known. According to the method, when an error or data loss is detected in data received in a receiver unit, the receiver unit may request a transmitter unit to retry transmission of the same data.
The method may be applied to the image forming apparatus in order to detect data transmission errors in print data received in the receiver unit in the head-controlling function module, and when an error is detected, the receiver unit may request the transmitter unit to retry transmission of the same print data. In this configuration, it is expected that deterioration of the image forming quality may be prevented.